One of objectives of mobile communication systems which have already been put to practical use or of which the specifications are currently under development (see 3GPP TS36.300 V8.5.0 (2008-05), for example) is to provide a wide variety of services between mobile stations and network devices. Also, because of the improvement in the diffusion ratio of mobile phones and in the coverage of communication area, present-day mobile communication systems are expected to serve as public communication means during an abnormal time. For example, the mobile communication systems are expected to send users' mobile phones a notification of specific information indicating an emergency situation, such as earthquake information or fire information.
An emergency call accepting system has hitherto been proposed which is configured to accept, through a mobile communication network, image-containing emergency information from a mobile telephone device having a video-telephone function and thus capable of capturing an image and transmitting and receiving images (see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2008-48335, for example).
There has also been proposed an emergency reporting system by which, on discovering an abnormal situation, a supervisor can immediately notify nearby workers and the department concerned of the contents of abnormality by voice even in a very noisy environment such as a production site, and also emergency information can be quickly obtained from a separate abnormality detection system insofar as a worker exists in the production site (see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2000-242873, for example).
The conventional mobile communication systems are, however, associated with the problem that emergency information fails to be notified immediately depending on the state, such as a standby state or a communicating state, of a wireless terminal.